This Week in the Future, January 28-February 4, 2011
This week, we’re doing things a little differently. Resident artist Baarbarian has captured five of our most eye-catching stories of...

This week, we’re doing things a little differently. Resident artist Baarbarian has captured five of our most eye-catching stories of the week in this picture, but to win a t-shirt adorned with it, you won’t have to guess all five correctly. Instead, you’ll have to tell us which story is your favorite and why–in less than 140 characters.
The rules are as follows: We want to hear which of these five stories, linked below, is your favorite and why. Doing so is easy: Follow us on Twitter (where we go by the name @popsci, oddly enough) and fire off a tweet with your feelings on one of these stories, condensed into 140 characters. Mention us at the start of the tweet and end it with the hashtag #TWITF, and our favorite will be the proud recipient of this week’s sweet Baarbarian-inked t-shirt (which you can also buy here, if contests aren’t really your thing). Here are the options:
- Israelis Trading Airport Security Dogs for Highly Trained Mouse Teams
- A Company Seeks Ubiquitous Iris Scans On PCs, ATMs and Cell Phones
- By Swapping Just a Few Key Particles, Researchers Atomically Engineer Magnets For Custom Purposes
- Using Special Crystals, Researchers Make a Paper Clip Invisible
- Stretchy, Sticky Mussel Fibers Inspire New Types of Tough Waterproof Adhesives
And don’t forget to check out our other great stories from this past week–especially our reports from Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine laboratory in Seattle.
- Breakfast at Myhrvold’s: Pea Butter, Drinkable Bagels, and Other Modernist Miracles
- A Tour of The Modernist Cuisine Kitchen Laboratory
- Weekend Project: PopSci Takes a Home Kitchen Centrifuge For A Spin
- Archive Gallery: A Century of Vehicular DIY
- Waging War on Winter With Science and Tech
- The Internet Officially Runs Out of Addresses Today, But It’s Not Cause for Panic
- What Could Possibly Go Wrong: Incredibly Dangerous Scientific Ideas That Have Thankfully Been Discarded